A while back, the almighty algorithm behind YouTube started spamming me with clips from something called ‘Sharpe’, oftentimes with click-baity titles like “Sharpe Meets His Disrespectful Squad” or “Sharpe Makes a Horrifying Discovery”. At first I was annoyed, but after a while my interest became piqued. What was this show? Was that the fabled Man-of-a-Thousand-Deaths character actor Sean Bean — He Who Dies in EVERYTHING — as the lead? Was this an elaborate joke? I thought perhaps that I might have stumbled across a sleeper hit, a forgotten ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ type show, or at the very least something so cheesy that it would be fun. I needed answers, so I saddled up for a very long weekend of binging. (Please Note: each episode is roughly the length of a feature-length movie, and after watching six grueling episodes of a sixteen-episode series, I decided, out of self-preservation, that I had had enough.)

‘Sharpe’ centers around the exploits of Richard Sharpe, a fictitious common-man in the British army during the Napoleonic Wars, who is given a battlefield promotion to Lieutenant after saving the life of his commanding officer. Due to his newfound commission, Sharpe is given command of a crack team of sharpshooters (hey, wait a minute), and goes on many daring adventures. He often finds himself up against some sort of villain of the week, and there’s usually a pretty lady that he ends up getting hot and steamy with by the end of each episode. The basic concept of ‘Sharpe’, albeit a bit dated, is fun and promising. However, it has one major flaw: Sharpe, both as a character and a series, is utterly and completely boring.

Tonally, ‘Sharpe’ takes itself far too seriously. This is where a know-it-all history-buff would chime in with something deep and profound like “But war is serious!” War is indeed serious, but this isn’t a war show. Sure, it takes place during a war, but the focus of the action is less on the specifics of the war itself, and more on the adventures our protagonist finds himself embroiled in. Thus, ‘Sharpe’ is an adventure series.

Unfortunately, as an adventure series, it fails to do its primary objective —chiefly, to entertain —because it takes itself too seriously. ‘Sharpe’ finds itself bogged down by the weight of constantly trying to maintain a television friendly sense of realism, which combined with the humble budget of a television series of its day —coupled with some stale, unimaginative direction —ultimately leaves it feeling like a bit of a slog.

Of course, the biggest issue with ‘Sharpe’ is Sharpe. Generally, when writing a protagonist, you want to give them the structural growth a character undergoes throughout the duration of a story, and character growth is important because it gives us as the audience a reason to connect with and ultimately care about the events as they unfold in the story. Sharpe lacks this basic character formula called an arc. There’s even a basic arc formula for writing a protagonist — referred to as The Hero’s Journey — that can be broken down into three stages:

One: A Regular Nobody

When we meet our protagonist, they’re usually a plucky nobody, often-times down on their luck and hoping to break out of their mundane life in order to make it big. They have big dreams, a bigger heart and no clue of just how big of an adventure they’re about to embark upon. It’s at this point where circumstances sweep them of their feet and away they go on their adventure. By contrast, when we are initially introduced to Sharpe, the first thing he does is single-handedly kill three enemy cavalry scouts, rescuing his general in the process, all while having his morning shave. This is where that know-it-all history-buff would interject once again. “But when we meet him, he’s a lowly enlisted man! And he struggles with the classism of his day!” This is true, Sharpe does repeatedly deal with being “a man risen from the ranks” — as the show is oft to remind us — but ‘Sharpe’ isn’t an upstairs/downstairs drama like ‘Downton Abbey’, it’s an adventure series.

Two: An Important Loss

After a bit of adventuring, our protagonist gains a sense of the broader picture. Perhaps they realize that the world they inhabit is more complicated and nuanced than they first perceived, or maybe they’ve begun to grow more confident in their own blossoming abilities. Lookout though, because this is also the part of the story where the hero’s mentor usually dies a tragic, heroic death, right before their very eyes. With the proverbial wind knocked out of their sails, our protagonist will often become full of self-doubt, questioning whether they should even be adventuring in the first place.

Unless of course they’re Sharpe, in which case he’s generally just annoyed or inconvenienced by whatever is troubling him up to this point.

Three: A Newfound Sense of Self-Worth

This is the point in our narrative where, after some reflection, our hero realizes their full potential and overcomes their biggest obstacles. But, in the case of ‘Sharpe’, we’ve reached the end of the episode’s runtime, so it’s time for him to easily dispatch this week’s adversary like a period-piece James Bond. At this point, a regular protagonist has had an arc, but ole Sharpe has plateaued in a straight line. Throughout the series, every obstacle Sharpe faces comes of less like an actual threat and more like a minor inconvenience or chore. If you introduce your adventure protagonist as an unkillable badass, they have no room for growth, and if your character doesn’t have any growth or self-actualization, we as an audience don’t have anyone to latch on to. With no one to care about, what’s the point?

All is not lost though, because again, ‘Sharpe’ has potential to be entertaining, if done a little differently … and I have a couple of ideas. If I were to adapt it for a modern audience as a dramatic adventure series, I’d take the less is more approach, whittling the source material down to its bare-bones essence, and reworking it from there. I think a period adventure series about an unconventional British agent could be fun, but instead of basing each episode of an entire book, I’d look to more modern shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ and adapt it a book per season.

Conversely, it could be spoofed. I’m imagining a send-up of low-budget adventure shows with a character who, for all intents and purposes, is Roger Moore’s James Bond, but set in the early 1800’s. Maybe in this version, Sharpe has a reputation as a jack-of-all-trades, but in reality, he’s a bumbling buffoon who lucks his way in and out of every situation he gets entangled in. I think it could make for some interesting commentary on the genre as a whole, or at the very least, it could be good for some cheap laughs.

‘Sharpe’ is available to watch via a subscription to Britbox. Out of a total of sixteen grueling episodes, David Schildman only made it through six before crying out in agony and giving up. Have you managed to watch more? All? Good on ya! Email your opinions on ‘Sharpe’ to david@omahadailyrecord.com.